English-language titles

Amy Witting returns to the theme of 'marriage' in this her third novel.

Ella, a woman in her early fifties must face up to many issues when her husband suddenly leaves her for a much younger woman. Ella discovers that her life has been ruled by 'facades' and outworn conventions and that she has not confronted the reality of her relationship with both husband and children. Protected, she has 'seen no evil, heard no evil and spoken no evil'. Alone she must learn about the 'separate worlds' of the others in her family and the wider realities of life outside the confining house which has been her protection for so long. As well she must come to terms with the 'evil' within herself.

Decades of hard work have made Austin Broderick a rich man. His sheep station, Springfield, is one of the largest in Australia and the good relations between the Aborigines and the Brodericks have made it one of the most peaceful. Now Austin must face the prospect of losing a large proportion of his land at the hands of Parliament. His only hope is his son Harry and the young man's influence as a Brisbane politician. But the family's troubles have only just begun. The pious Reverend Billings arrives at the station and, under the guise of friendship, enters the Aborigines' camp. He leaves with three six-year-old boys - eager for adventure, but destined for misery...

Mel is busy trying to keep her life together when Bo Black enters the picture. It’s bad enough that gutsy pilot Mel Anderson has to clean up after her lovable but completely disorganized best friend and business partner, Dimi, while her certifiable employees make more work than they do. Now, the one man she hoped she’d never see again is back and looking for trouble. Scratch that, he is trouble. Amazing, more please trouble…

Dashing, mysterious & enticing, Bo instantly captivates her. Luckily she resists her urges long enough to realize that Bo is really there to take back ownership of the airport Mel has worked so hard to maintain. Bo’s determined to get his family's airport back. And this laid-back Aussie is nobody’s fool. Thing is, neither is Mel. She’s intense. Uptight. Sexy. And very, very tempting. Suddenly, Bo’s thinking less about revenge and more about kissing and touching and falling into a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of forever love…

In the autumn of 1628, the Dutch East Indiaman Batavia set sail on her maiden voyage to Java, loaded with a king's ransom in gold, silver and gems. But, in the early hours of 4 June, the ship ran aground in an unexplored chain of islands off the coast of Australia. More than 200 survivers were left stranded, at the mercy of a ruthless band of muniteers headed by a brilliant but deranged individual. By the time rescue ships arrived three months later, less than 80 people were still alive...

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of their beginning, with Master and Commander, these evocative stories are being re-issued in paperback with smart new livery. This is the fifteenth book in the series.

All the elements that have made Patrick O'Brian's astonishing series one of the most highly praised works in contemporary fiction are here in Clarissa Oakes - the narrative grip, the impeccable ear for dialogue, the humour and the unsurpassed capacity to create and recreate a rich and true friendship between two men in the late eighteenth-century. Captain Jack Aubrey sails away from the hated Australian prison colonies in his favourite vessel the Surprise, pondering on middle age and sexual frustration. He soon becomes aware that he is out of touch with the mood of his ship: to his astonishment he finds that in spite of a lifetime's experience he does not know what the foremost hands or even his own officers are thinking. They know, as he does not, that the Surprise has a stranger aboard: and what they, for their part, do not know is that the stranger is potentially as dangerous as a light in the powder magazine itself.

Cleave is Nikki Gemmell's second book (known as "Alice Springs" in the U.S.A.)

"The story begins with a cheque. The envelope that carried it was bruised with grubbiness and worn thin from too many hands. The envelope took two months to find her. The amount of the cheque was substantial and the typewritten instructions were blunt: hunt him down."

With her grandmother's note in her hand, Snip Freeman embarks on a journey into the vast and fierce landscape of the Australian interior, to find her father and unravel the terrifying silence of her childhood. As she drives, sitting beside her in the hot, dusty truck is Dave, a man who longs to share his life with hers, but cannot find the words to pin her down.

When Snip reaches her father, Bud, it is in the communal land of the Aborigines and perhaps Snip has finally come home. But suddenly the shadow of past mistakes looms darkly over the forbidding territory and Bud must flee. With faith in the stranger, Dave, slowly dissolving, and in desperation for her father's love, she follows. And it is here, on the journey they take together, as they face the cruel expanse of the Australian desert, that Snip must discover the most horrifying truth of all.

The magnificent first novel by the Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2014.

Beneath a waterfall on the Franklin, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, lies drowning. Beset by visions at once horrible and fabulous, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. In the rainforest waters that rush over him he sees those lives stripped bare of their surface realities, and finds a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking. As the river rises his visions grow more turbulent, and in the flood of the past Aljaz discovers the soul of his country.

Catriona Summers' debut in show business came early. Her father, the leader of a travelling music hall troupe that toured the small towns of the Australian Outback, carried her on stage when she was barely minutes old in order to introduce her to her first audience. From such humble beginnings Catriona had grown up to emerge as a rare talent, her voice garnering her praise from the public and critics alike. But her journey from performing popular songs for a few pennies to becoming an acclaimed opera diva on the Sydney stage has been fraught with hardship and tragedy. And now some old scandalous secrets from her teenage years are threatening her present, her family and all she has achieved...

Nine haunting stories from the award winning author of Remembering Babylon, in which history and geography, as well as the past and the present, combine and often collide, illuminating the landscape and revealing the character of Australia.

An eleven-year-old boy sees his father in his own elongated shadow only to realize that he will not return from the war. In a parting moment, a young woman hired to “marry” vacationing soldiers, grasps the weight of the word “woe.” When a failing farmer senselessly murders a wandering aborigine, he imperils his son but discovers in the spring of sympathy that follows the power to influence others. Wise and moving, startling and lyrical, Dream Stuff reverberates with the unpredictability of human experience, revealing people who are shaped by the mysterious rhythms of nature as well as the ghosts of their own pasts.

From the image of a small boy entranced by his mother's GI Escort, yet still hoping for the return of a father 'missing in action', to the portrait of an adult writer trying to piece together a defining image of his late father, these outstanding stories conjure up with sharp intensity the memories and events that make a man.

Powerfully vivid stories by a great writer, they range over more than a century of Australian life, from green tropical lushness to 'blacksoil country', from scrub and outback to city streets-evoking dark shadows beneath a bright sun, and lives shaped by the ghosts of history and the rhythms of unruly nature.

It's a special occasion Down Under - the notoriously frugal Inspector Malone is taking his family to dinner at one of Sydney's finest Chinese restaurants. But their gala turns grisly when a masked assassin enters and guns down three men at a nearby table.

As Sydney prepares for its grand role as host of the next Olympic Games, Scobie Malone is confronted with solving a scam that does nothing for the city's image. Lurking beneath a facade of respectability, illicit deals are being struck and money from Hong Kong is being banked in large quantities. But whose money is it, and where is it really from?

Book no. 15 in the Scobie Malone series, a family-man and police inspector in Sydney, Australia.

In a small town like any other small town around Australia live the Maloneys. They are a fifth-generation Australian family of Irish Catholic descent who are struggling to reach the first run of the social ladder. The Maloneys are a family you won't forget: a strong mother, a father broken by war, three boys and two girls, one of whom has an illegitimate daughter. Each of their lives is changed forever by the four fires – passion, religion, warfare and fire itself.

Four Fire is unashamedly a story of the power of love and the triumph of the human spirit against the odds.

Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all the living things on the land and the gfishes in the seas were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a convict in Van Diemen's Land who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer, forger, fantasist, condemned to live in the most brutal penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. Once upon a time, miraculous things happened...

In Australian slang, an Illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey’s uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character — especially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies.

As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts.

Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere. Illywhacker was shortlisted for the 1985 Booker Prize and won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and The Age Book of the Year Award. It was also short-listed for the 1986 World Fantasy Award.

Jacaranda Vines had been one of the wealthiest corporations in Australia. Now Joseph Witney, the tyrannical head of the family, is dead and Jacaranda Vines is at crisis point.

Joseph's widow, Cordelia, is determined not to sell. If she can persuade her granddaughter, Sophie, to change her mind then, together, they might have a hope of winning over the other family members. Sophie agrees at least to accompany her grandmother on a road trip to the Hunter Valley, site of the company's first vineyard. But, in order to get Sophie to understand exactly what she is fighting for, Cordelia must confide both family secrets and ancient history. She begins her story with Rose, a young girl running from her native England hoping to find a new life in the wild unknown of Australia.

Following the worldwide success of Matilda's Last Waltz, Tamara McKinley's second Australian epic, Jacaranda Vines established her as a leading romantic novelist. From the Sussex Downs in the 1930's to modern day Australia, Jacaranda Vines traces the lives of several generations of the unforgettable family that founded one of the wealthiest wine corporations in Australia.

Three eccentric, secluded nuns live on a remote island, forgotten by time and the Church - until a priest unwittingly happens upon them. Father Ignatius is as surprised to see the nuns as they are to see a flesh-and-blood man, and what follows is the strange, moving, and often hilarious story of their struggle - a struggle of wills, and of faith. Lambs of God is a charming, poignant page-turner from crime novelist Marele Day.

Bennett jogs along the country bitumen an anxious man, his crete hat guarding against the magpie's deadly swoop. Who is he, where has Jasmine gone, why is he overwhelmed by a sense of doom? Pat-pat, pat-pat, pat-pat ... his dogged feet propel him inexorably into a comic nightmare.

'When I sit down at the desk I can feel my characters cringe,' Nabokov once remarked. The characters in Magpie might well cringe as they are put through their hoops by two of Australia's leading writers in a novel that is part collaboration, part argument and always irreverent fun.

'A satire of the perils of publishing and the anxieties of authorship, Magpie ends as a playful parody of certain trends in literary theory ... an audacious and entertaining romp.' - Australian Bookseller and Publisher

It was one of the greatest human experiments ever undertaken: to populate an unknown land with the criminal, the unloved and the unwanted of English society. Amid conditions of brutality that paralleled those of slavery, 'The First Fleet' was sent to a place no European but the legendary Captain Cook had ever seen. Left to live or die on the hostile Australian continent, these convicts - and their equally isolated guards - occupy the centre of Colleen McCullough's compelling new epic. Richard Morgan - convicted felon and educated, intelligent, resourceful man - finds the will to survive, experience the joys of love, and finally make an incredible mark upon the new frontier.

A thoroughly researched historical saga rich in romance, adventure and unforgettable characters, Morgan's Run has the makings of a modern classic.

An American woman is summoned by a remote tribe of nomadic Aboriginals who call themselves "the Real People" to accompany them on a four-months-long walkabout through the Outback. While traveling barefoot with them through 1,400 miles of rugged desert terrain, she learns a new way of life, including their methods of healing, based on the wisdom of a 50,000-year-old culture. Ultimately, she experiences a dramatic personal transformation.

Following her modern classic and worldwide bestseller A Mutant Message Down Under, Marlo Morgan's long-awaited second novel is a tale of self-enlightenment about aboriginal twins separated at birth and the search for roots that reunites them from opposite sides of the globe. Message from Forever is an incredibly moving story in which the power of purity, acceptance, and openness transcends injustice and degradation, directing us to live our lives in accordance with ageless values and simple wisdom.

Ten messages of aboriginal wisdom you will explore in Message From Forever

When Murray Whelan, lovelorn political minder and part-time fitness fanatic, is recruited to massage Australia's bid for the Olympics he has no idea how tough the going will get.

Not even the sight of the gorgeous Holly Deloite in her taut blue leotard at the City Club can stop him diving head first into trouble. And, when the death of the young Aboriginal athlete Darcy Anderson proves that murder is a contact sport, Murray is soon breaking all the rules.

Mixing it with a savvy black activist, a body-building psychopath and the enigmatic Dr Phillipa Knox, Murray jumps the gun every time.

The sequel to the 1999 CBC Book of the Year "Deadly Unna?", this book continues following the story of fifteen-year-old Blacky, who isn't sure what he wants or where he's going. The one thing he does know is that he wants to escape the small country town he's grown up in, but for the moment, he's stuck.

When Danielle wants something, she usually gets it - and playing goal-kepper for Hartley High is what she wants. But she has plenty of battles ahead of her: discrimination, a jealous boyfriend, and a teacher who bans her favourite sport. Add a team-mate who's been dealt a double dose of grief, plus a sister who can't stay out of trouble, and you'll see why Danielle's definitely feeling offside.

Offside is the sequel to Rap Pack.

Based on the very popular Australian TV series Heartbreak High, these books follow the loves, trials & tribulations of the students at a fictional Sydney high school.

Peter Carey's Booker Prize winning novel imagines Australia's youth, before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story.

Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-nineteenth century Australia.

Peter Carey's visionary brilliance, and his capacity to delight and surprise, propel this story to its stunning conclusion.